


Asterius

by snagov



Category: Hades (Video Game 2018)
Genre: Asterius POV, Enemies to Lovers, Falling In Love, Forbidden Love, M/M, POV First Person, References to Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Self-Hatred, Sexual Tension, greek myth is full of weird shit, some Piranesi inspiration, some graphic description cause the minotaur literally eats people
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-18
Packaged: 2021-03-15 03:15:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28556712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snagov/pseuds/snagov
Summary: Every nine years, a sacrifice is sent to the Labyrinth.
Relationships: Asterius | The Minotaur/Theseus (Hades Video Game)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 66





	1. Chapter 1

_Mean-while the monster of a human-beast,_  
 _His family's reproach, and stain, increas'd._  
 _His double kind the rumour swiftly spread,_  
 _And evidenc'd the mother's beastly deed._  
 _When Minos, willing to conceal the shame_  
 _That sprung from the reports of tatling_  
 _Fame, Resolves a dark inclosure to provide,_  
 _And, far from sight, the two-form'd creature hide._  
\- Ovid, _Metamorphoses_  
(Trans. by Sir Samuel Garth, John Dryden, et al)

_Three days before_

They say I am my mother’s fault.   
Pah. What do they know?  
(They’re right.) 

A beetle skitters in the dark. I stamp my foot on it, feeling the carapace crunch between my toes and spit on my hand to wipe it off. My stomach growls and I look at the thing, thinking about eating it, but a beetle against an ocean of hunger seems pointless. I scrape it off and throw it in the corner. The rest run. 

It is not a place for visitors. I do not have many visitors. In another curve, another opening, there is a small window; long and narrow, large enough for the moon and the flies. I can’t even get one horn through. Doesn’t matter. I watch the moon for long hours, waxing and waning, shifting through the clouds. I name all the birds. When the sun comes, I sleep. Light burns me. 

Doesn’t matter.

There is a single window to the outside world and I mark all distances from it. The Windowed Room is one of the few chambers to be roughly equilateral, a comfortable square with hay piled up in a corner. It is warm and dry, kept in the opposite corner from the window, where the rain cannot get at it. Torches and lanterns line the walls here, and in the adjacent halls and rooms, keeping the dark away. I have cloth, blankets, books, tools! A king in his castle. 

Except I cannot leave.

I think I am twenty-seven years old. It’s difficult to calculate as I did not begin my calendar until the first sacrifice. That was when I was nine, my mother told me, and they repeat every nine years. My calendar is simple; I carve notches on the wall. I scrape another in with a piece of shattered obsidian, left behind by one hero or another. It might have been a knife once, years ago. When I step back, I count the notches. Another year past. It’s nearly time for heroes again. I loathe the heroes, the way they come with clubs swinging and thick cocks fat and stupid between their thighs. 

This will be the third sacrifice. 

My stomach rumbles. God, I’m hungry. There has been no food brought to me in a week, though it usually comes each day, appearing in a small alcove through a system of levers and dumbwaiters. I am being starved before the sacrifice. 

When I look for food, I find only a grindstone to sharpen my horns.

What’s there to eat? Let’s see. I rattle my pot and spy a few bones, polished by boiling water and how they’d rubbed against the metal sides. You may not know this but bones are a good meal. If you crack them open, break them right down the center, marrow’s a feast.

* * *

I have a name, you know. 

No, you wouldn’t know that. No one wants a beast to have a name. Then you might have to look me in the eye. But I have a name, my mother gave it to me, holding me upon her lap. Moonlight came through the windows and she wore white, sharp against her blotchy, red face. Sweat stuck her pale hair to her head. (She tells me I could not remember this but I do, I remember everything.) 

Do you want to know my name? 

It’s Asterius. Star-like. Seems fitting that the only thing I see are stars. My mother is the daughter of a god and I am the son of my mother; heaven runs in my veins. Hell too. My grandfather is the sun. She was fifteen when she was brought to Crete by ship, sailing over the sea, clad in a sea of white. Minos, my stepfather, had bargained her in a deal with the gods. It came with a thousand pieces of gold. A two-for-one deal, you might say. 

I wonder what my father’s name was. She’s never told me. I’ve never asked. There’s no room in the world for a bull’s head and a man’s body: I cannot wear a helmet and I cannot pull a cart. What good is that? This is why no one hates the centaurs. They’re good for the economy. 

* * *

I sleep. I wake. I break the bones of the dead in two and lick the marrow from the middle. Heroes’ bones taste the best, glutted with red blood cells. The bones of the peasants they feed me throughout the year are nothing. I shift on my haunches, scratching my thighs, my back, my balls. That itchy need is hot and heavy between my legs and I remember the way the ram had mounted the ewe, thrusting blindly with his horns scraping the air. There’s nothing here but bones so I make do with my own hand and think of nothing. 

A feast of nothing. Fit for a king. 

Dark. Still dark. The dark was before light and will come after light. I collect words for the dark: umbra, penumbra, shadow, night, charcoal, ink. 

It doesn’t matter what I name things. If I name things. No one else uses these words.

My mother came often to the Labyrinth at first, always quiet. She was forbidden from purchasing toys for me so she made things instead: rugs, blankets, paintings, bowls. She wrapped an embroidered shawl around me once and smiled, kissing the space of my brow between my eyes. Now, when she comes, she brings apples and looks sad. She had held me once but I am twice her size, so I hold her instead. Her hair is longer now and greyer. She is still beautiful. They say the children of the gods will always be beautiful; I’m not sure if that’s true. Sometimes, when she takes her little knife and cuts the apples for us, setting out the cheese and honey, I watch her hands and notice how the years have changed them. The skin has thinned, papering out over her veins and tendons, and her hands are darkened with sun and freckles. I wonder what she thinks of her hands, what she thinks of mine. How strange that we cannot go backward, that time is this endless, immortal march. Is time the one thing that the gods do not own?

* * *

This is the first of all Labyrinths. It was built for me with the money my stepfather had planned for his own tomb. 

Why didn’t they just kill me?

I don’t know. Couldn’t tell you. 

The Labyrinth is without beginning and without end. I have explored it in all its myriad paths, at least what I can get to; there are paths that delve deep below water and paths that climb steeply upward, descending and ascending beyond my existence. Perhaps someday. I am more curious about where they lead than by the scene of the world beyond my little window. Sometimes, when the sun is shifting, I try to press my face to the bars and to estimate the size and height of the Labyrinth by the shadow it casts, but it’s no use, Daedalus was clever when he designed it and surrounded the walls with trees and false walls beyond. Beyond every wall, another wall. 

I sleep in the room with the window and use the halls for running practice. They’re long and marble in places, dirt in others; I try to keep in shape. One room, a hall, is grander than the rest, and Daedalus has set statues of the gods here and a little brazier so that I might say my prayers; even a condemned creature is a child of the gods, he might say. 

They bring me meat. I catch rats and cook them over a fire. I fish in the dark ponds where the Labyrinth fades away into the sea. I do not like the water. I’ve never learnt how to swim. Why learn? I have seen the edges of the ponds, which passageways and halls make up their borders; all ponds are contained within the Labyrinth, all I would do is get to another side.

I am beginning to believe the Labyrinth does not end. Riddle me this, where is the beginning? Where is the end? Why do I imagine that the Labyrinth is linear, that the Labyrinth might make any sense as another house might? Is the Labyrinth a circle, does it open upon itself, if I follow it, would it not simply lead me back to where I began? But, I hear you say, Asterius, that is impossible, you can see the outside world from your window! This is true, but I have never been there, so how do I know it is real? What if it is a lie? Planted there by the gods to torment me? What if the world has only and ever been my Labyrinth? 

But then, there are the men who come. The Athenians, they call themselves. I suppose they could be planted by the gods as well, called into being just as they opened the front door. But then, let’s imagine that this is not true and that they do come from an Athens beyond. What is an Athens? What does it look like? My mother told me stories of Athens: wide roads, blue skies, brightly painted statues leaning over the harbor. I tried to imagine what a harbor looked like and she told me. “Imagine your lakes, Asterius,” she said, speaking of where the Labyrinth sank and grew huge caverns of underground lakes, ones I have never crossed. “Imagine lakes under the sky that go on and on, endlessly, where you cannot see land in any direction.” 

The water haunted me and I shivered. Endless lakes! Endless sky!

No, I think, I do not wish to see the world. Not if it is without end.

* * *

I can hear revelers from my window, singing while they leave the symposium. It’s rare that I hear singing, few like to pass near my Labyrinth, their eyes always shifting nervously toward the structure. I wonder what it looks like to them, what it looks like from the outside. I was so young when I entered that I’ve forgotten.

Doesn’t matter.

I hear footsteps in the corridor beyond. I sit up. Who is it? I have three visitors from time to time: my mother, her mother, and Daedalus the Guilty, architect of my palace. He always brings meat in a basket, wrapped in paper and twine. His mouth twists sadly beneath his white beard. He knows what he did. He’s why I’m here. 

We don’t count the Athenians. They’re not men, they’re meat.

“Asterius,” a voice says. It sounds like summer. I know her, the voice of my mother. 

“I’m here.”

“It’s a mess in here.” She frowns as she steps over a pile of papers. I’ve been attempting to write my story, you see, which is why you are here, reading this. Just in case. 

“Sorry.”

“Your father sends his love.” 

I do not say that King Minos is not my father and that I do not believe her. This is a fiction that keeps her warm at night, this is a lie that allows her to sleep. Some lies are like blankets, I’ve learned, and we cover ourselves with them to block out the world. For example, I tell myself that one day I will leave this place. I nod and she strokes my head, her smile kind and tired. There have been rumors that I have heard from my window that my mother had abandoned me, that she had taken one look at me when I was born, half-bull and half-man, and cast me out in terror. The world runs on rumor, even when they can see for themselves that she comes to the Labyrinth nearly every day. What is the truth but an inconvenience? Good stories weren’t built on truth. It doesn’t matter what they say, I tell myself, I know my mother loves me. She does, you know. She loves me even if it is not always in the way I would like. 

I know she wishes I had been born a man. Not his half-monster, half-creature, half-man, half-demon, wholly unacceptable sort of thing.

Still, she smiles. 

“I have a secret,” she says, putting a finger to her lips though there is no one but the beetles to hear. She pulls back the cloth in her basket of books, revealing a loaf of bread and a roasted chicken. 

“Thank Zeus,” I say, “I’m starving.”

She hands me the loaf. “Eat up. You’ll need your strength. The Athenians are a few days out.”

“How many?”

“Three, I believe. Barring rough water.”

I nod and chew, as if that means anything to me. My window only looks out onto Knossos, over the palace and trees. I cannot see the sea. Not from here.

Boil the sea. I wouldn’t want to look on it anyway. Not when Poseidon, god of the sea, is the reason I’m here in the first place. My stepfather, King Minos, had prayed to Poseidon to show him favor over his brothers and to send a bull as white as snow as a sign. “Deliver me a bull as pure as the whitecaps, o Lord,” he had said, cutting the throat of a lamb. And the god did send a bull, telling him to sacrifice the beast within nine days to return the favor. 

“He’s a remarkable thing, isn’t he?” Minos had said, patting the bull’s back. My mother, Pasiphae, had looked on in indifferent admiration, like any queen at the racetracks. 

“Isn’t he just?” She had said.

Nine days passed and King Minos found another bull in his herds, one of a cream color, spotted and beautiful, nearly a perfect imitation - but just that, an imitation - and slit the throat of the cream bull instead, lying through his rotten teeth to the god. “Here is your sacrifice!” Minos said, gloating, king of favor and bulls both. But you know how it is trying to get one over on a god. Poseidon decided to punish him. He looked to my mother and struck love into her heart for the bull. I’ll skip the details, but she had Daedalus, the palace craftsman, fashion a hollow wooden cow for her. And, well, this, that, and the other thing, and I was born. It's always children that are punished for their parents' sins.

It’s a bit of a messy family history. You can see why I share no love of the sea.

I chew and think. My mother, with soft brown hair and mossy eyes, two things I know well, looks up at the window. I wonder what she thinks of it, knowing more of the sky than I do. They change throughout the year but she has told me that there are more stars than I know, that they stretch across the sky like a dome, burning all the way. I like to give the stars I know names and stories, just as I name the rats. 

“Tell me,” she says, “What the stars did today.”


	2. Chapter 2

_Two days before_

I am in the practice room, which I believe forms the nucleus of the Labyrinth. This _cella_ , the Hall of Gods, lined with statues, where I sharpen my weapon. In the torches, the yellow-white of the walls gleam, cut from marble. Yellow-white, the color of unrendered fat. The marble, I knew, had been quarried on Mount Pentelicus, northeast of Athens, and had been shipped here at great cost. Minos had insisted on having the marble. He’d insisted on a roof of cedar beams and the tiles, where they line the reflecting pool, are inlaid with gold. It’s an apology, really, an apology for what he’s done.

I am waiting for the heroes, who will come in two days’ time. They haven’t always been brought to me. As a boy, I used to practice killing. I’d found a long, thin stick and practiced striking in the same way I’d watched the soldiers at drill, swooping up and down like it was a rapier. I’d arranged a basket on top of a stone and struck at it. It fell to the ground. _Aha!_ I’d thought, _I took your head._ I’d wondered then what the crowd would do when they sent the guards in to check and found only their Athenian son in pieces. A shout! They would shout. I imitated it. I still do. Screams too. I shout and speak and scream and cry, all in a language I have invented, shared between only me and the rocks. You hate me, whomever you are. Good, I want you to hate me. Look at me, see me, feast on me. I hate you back. _Mother!_ you call, _Asterius’ called me a bad name!_ God, how does it sicken you, to look at me in my hovel, my pit of hunger, this little rag-and-bone shop of no one’s heart? Come closer, I’ll eat you up too.

I ready my blade and strike again. 

Hack! Slash! Burn! Crash!

I wipe the sweat from my brow and lean the sword against the wall. Tapestries cover walls and statues, all by the great sculptor Pheidias, look down on me, here in the room of worship. The brazier burns and I lift my sword again, putting it to Poseidon’s throat. Well, to his statue. The marble is long wounded and chipped, beaten and battered. I do not hit another god. Only _him_. Really, sometimes, I glance to the carvings of Zeus and Hades, his brothers, and think they might even look pleased. 

“What do you say, old boys?” I ask, leaning on Hades’ shoulder. “Can I take him?” They say there’s a direct line to hell from my Labyrinth, if you sail from one of the rivers below.

* * *

I am still in the cella when the voice comes, booming and echoing through the passageways.

“Asterius. Where are you?”

I move into the torchlight. My grandmother’s voice. Perse. 

“Here, grandmama.”

She steps into the hall, taller than I am but not as quite as tall as the statues. I am taller than men and she, a goddess, dwarfs them. My grandmother, one of the myriad daughters of Oceanus and Tethys, wife of Helios, my grandfather, god of the sun. Her hair is as dark as the deepest parts of the ocean and her eyes as blue as river shallows. She and my grandfather are the children of the Titans and I, from them, share no Olympian blood. I am a forgotten cousin of the Olympians, left to rot in the dark.

Narcissistic pricks.

“I’ve brought you something.” She hands me a basket. It’s meat, thick and fatty. While I eat, white, perfect globules streaming down my chin, she talks. “The Athenians are a day out. They’ll arrive tomorrow.”

I grunt. Good, I think, I’m starving. The youths will arrive and my stepfather will hold a banquet, feasting them and fattening them. If I’m lucky, they’ll taste still of wine and apples. 

“I have a bad feeling about this,” she says. “They’re sending a hero - the son of a god and of a king.” I am not surprised, such double-sons are common among heroes.

“Which god?”

“Poseidon.”

I grin and crack my knuckles. I have never eaten the offspring of gods before. Perse presses her mouth into a thin line and looks up at the statue of the god, who stands with one knee bent and trident held high, as if he were about to throw it. Poseidon, like his brothers Zeus and Hades, is long-haired and long-bearded, with blank, staring eyes of the marble of Paros, finer and paler than that of even Pentelicus. I imagine that his brothers’ eyes are kinder. Fabric drapes at his waist in some respect to a modesty the gods have never known. He is between both of his brothers: Zeus sits at his right on a chryselephantine throne of ivory plates and gold detailing, his beard rippling over his chin, and Hades to his left, on an ebony throne with a cornucopia and sceptre at his command. They both look as if they were about to rise. The remainder of the immortal cohort lines the rest of the room, each twelve meters high, looking down on me as if to laugh. Perse nudges me, watching how I watch them. 

“Eat,” she says. She rearranges the fabric of her peplos robes over the tile floor. The fabric sweeps from her shoulders to where it is girdled at her waist before falling to her ankles. I don’t know what it is made of, something soft and pale and white as snow, something the men and women of Knossos do not have. She is a goddess, after all, it is only right.

I eat.

“Daedalus will bring the sacrifices tomorrow,” she says.

“Do you know when?”

“No.”

I nod. Doesn’t matter. I don’t keep many appointments. 

“What’s his name?” I ask.

“Whose name?”

“The hero.”

She stares at the doorway for a moment, from where it leads from this Hall of Gods into empty and endless passageways. To the right, there is the room where I sleep; to the left, endless repetition and dark water. “Theseus,” she says at last, “son of Aegeus, king of Athens.” Again, I wonder what Athens is like. I wonder what Theseus is like, the young buck swaggering down the roads, grinning easily at the crowds, flipping a coin to them. Theseus, I decide, is the sort of man who forgets the days of his sacrifices, who cannot remember who begat whom, who rides a golden chariot now and will ride it all the way up to Mount Olympus. He probably washes his face in the gods’ reflecting pools, I think, wanting to spit. 

I spit.

“Don’t underestimate him, child,” Perse warns. 

“He hasn’t teeth like mine,” I laugh. 

“He’s slain six of you.” She does not mean other men, other bulls. She means monsters and the laugh dies in my mouth. 

“Shame they’ll have nothing to bury,” I say. Perse smiles her sharp smile and I watch her tilt her narrow head, the black hair falling across her throat like a knife. She knows the Labyrinth does not give up its dead. 

* * *

The marrow is my favorite part. To get at it, you crack a bone open. Some think it’s prettier to cut a bone vertically, like little bowls, but I prefer to snap it down the middle and suck the marrow from the trough. Marrow, pale yellowish-pink with spots of blood, melts over a fire into a clear, fatty soup and when I drink it, it smears slick across my mouth. I am not the only one who eats marrow, though the chefs in the palace of Knossos put it on a plate. The king uses a long spoon made of silver, I hear. 

I have no use for such a spoon.

Theseus! I will swallow you up! I get out my pot and my bowls, make space for a hearth fire. Sweep the floor, beat the rugs, even floss with a narrow bit of hay between my teeth. 

Best to look good for dinner.

* * *

Some say that Minos had only been doing what he had needed to, as a wronged husband and king alike. This Labyrinth - a castle, they say, and I hear them from my window - is more than anything I deserve. If you had seen him, the rumormongers say, you would think the same! He has teeth as sharp as swords and his eyes burn with brimstone. He has six horns - no, wait, eight - and even as a child had hands strong enough to crush a man’s windpipe. 

“He should have had his brains dashed out at birth,” another says.

“Or left exposed on a cliffside.”

“It was good enough for Oedipus,” one man might murmur wryly. 

“Yet he has a castle,” another says. “One that we paid for in sacks of grain.”

“This is the punishment the gods have sent us!” They cry.

Careful, I want to tell them. Careful what you say or I shall break out of my prison and creep up to your houses in the dead of night. I will eat your horses and crunch the bones between my teeth. I will make a feast of your wives and children. I will eat you up too and string your entrails around like confetti. 

But I don’t say that, at least, not where anyone can hear me.

* * *

It takes a long time to fall asleep. I pull the blankets over my shoulders, then push them off again. Up, down, over, under. Over and over again. I’m very tired. I’m wide awake. I stare into the corner, where my single oil lamp rests on my writing desk. I have made a bed of a pile of straw, warm and dry. There is a proper bed, a man’s bed, in another room, but there are no windows there so I do not use it. Here, there are shelves and my visitors have lined them with scrolls and codices. It would surprise the world, I imagine, to know that I am a reader. 

I know what they think of me. I’ve seen the jars, I’ve read the tales. 

A bowl of olives sits forgotten next to me. Sometimes I remember it and dip my hands in, licking the oil and salt from my fingers.

Sometimes I dream that I am in Athens. Not Knossos, never Knossos, just meters away, but Athens which is the source of stories. Here, in a face that isn’t my own, in a face that is unremarkable, I pass through the agora, hearing a cacophony of language and accent. They say that Athens is a metropolis, that you are an Athenian (the vote aside) the moment your ship lands at Piraeus, the port just beyond. There are men in Athens who dream of being remarkable but, let me tell you, the dream is on the other side. I wish to be invisible. Average. To have a face like any man’s face, to pass through the crowds in perfect indifference, watching the musicians and acrobats alike. If I were to be granted a face! If I had been born with a man’s face, not this beast of a mug, I would escape! I would sail to Athens, I think, and become a _metoikos_ , an immigrant, yes, and an Athenian. A metoikos cannot vote but perhaps, I think, aimless and dreaming, I could own an inn. A tavern. I would let the musicians sing (I am no musician) and the artists paint murals on my walls. If I were clever enough, rich enough, the very floor would be inlaid with mosaic tiles. I would serve as Athens commanded me, arraying myself with a panoplia, the armor and weaponry of hoplites, and I would take a lover. Two lovers! Four! As many as would have me. And, I think with screaming pleasure, they would not turn away at my looks. Yes, I imagine, they would look at me with love. I dream of the way King Minos the Miser looks not at my mother, his wife, but at gold. I would be gold to them. 

I would be happy. 

In truth, which I only admit to my bed of hay, I wouldn’t know what to do with a lover. I don’t really want a lover, just that all the stories speak of love. I wonder of love. My mother loves me, and my grandmother, cruel-faced Perse, too. And this bed, this room, this lamp, this window. I can feel the Labyrinth beating and shifting around me, the winds of the long halls racing through from the hot, dry cella to the cold underground lakes. I have learned the Labyrinth as much as it has learned me and the Labyrinth sends nothing that would hurt me. I wear the Labyrinth like a suit of armor, like a womb, dark and quiet and warm, and it secrets me within itself like a beating heart.

Perhaps all I would ask for is a door. One could be very happy with a door, couldn’t they? To go forth, into the light, but to always retreat back again, safe and sound? I would put doors into the Labyrinth and it would stay here for me, windows in every room, waiting for me like a hero’s mother, wondering if I’ll return. The Athenians would stop coming. No one would look in. I would be happy. 

I look down at my matted fur, where it thins across my breastbone to skin, stretching my hand across my belly. I am full and sated now; this is the kindness that hunger doesn’t allow. Tomorrow, they’ll starve me again and the bloodlust will go unslaked. 

Perhaps I could manage.

I could be happy, I think, then I blow the lamp out.

One more day till the hero comes.


End file.
